Being driven to distraction

IT WAS ONE of those insane traffic jams. I had just done a small errand for my mother-in-law, who lives five minutes away, and I had chosen to take the 580 freeway a mere two exits to get home.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon. It was raining. I got stuck on the on-ramp with no option but to remain stuck. I stared at the brake lights. It is interesting, I thought, that we as a nation have purchased millions of these high-powered vehicles and then chosen to use them as very small rooms in very unpleasant surroundings.

I've put in a lot of thinking time in traffic jams. I remind myself about the wisdom to know the difference and all that -- the Serenity Prayer is a wonderful antidote to traffic madness; no belief system is required. I pay attention to maintaining a safe distance from the car in front of me. I experience no resentments when that gap is constantly filled by crazed lane hoppers.

"Please go ahead of me," I say out loud. "It'll be nice to see a new pair of taillights." Perhaps I do not always say that. Perhaps sometimes I do not have the wisdom to know the difference.

So this particular rainy Thursday, motionless on the on-ramp in the gathering gloom, I had a sudden insight: Defensive driving depends on paying close attention to the very expensive cars and the very cheap cars.

If it's got tail fins and a dent in its side and a rope holding the trunk lid down and a bumper sticker that says "I Only Do What the Voices in My Head Tell Me," I back off and await developments. The driver will be unconcerned about further damage to the car and may have some authority issues. And if there's a guy in a Beemer who's using his cell phone while checking his side- view mirrors for yet another unsignaled lane change, I exercise the same caution. Drivers of big-ticket German automobiles almost always have a strong sense of entitlement. They own the road because they own everything. They can ignore the rules of the road, which were invented by ordinary people for ordinary people. They are special.

In other words: One group with nothing to lose, another group with a sense that it never loses. Ordinary deterrents do not work with these folks.

IT IS TEMPTING to say that these groups represent the very poor and the very rich, but that's not true -- the very poor don't have cars at all, and the very rich have drivers or helicopters or speaker-phones at their villas in Aspen from which they conduct all their business.

But still, we're talking about opposite ends of the economic spectrum. And it occurs to me (I've traveled perhaps 3 yards; the rain is coming down harder) that these are the groups that also give us most of our criminals.

Middle-class folks like me do not necessarily have more integrity, but we definitely have more fear. We don't want to get arrested; we don't want to be involved in an eight-car pileup on the interstate. We're all in the worst-case- scenario club, and we're pretty certain that we'll get caught or maimed or both. We use caution as a kind of amulet against fate.

POOR CRIMINALS FIGURE that stuff can't get much worse, so why not take a chance? Their downfall is that they aim too low, plan imperfectly and then repeat those mistakes until they get caught. Then they spend the rest of their lives wandering around the criminal justice system, except for some rare moments when they know freedom and decide to take a drive on the freeway.

Rich criminals do it because they know how to beat the system. They plan meticulously; if they weren't so greedy, they'd probably get away with it. When they get caught, they hire good lawyers and minimize the damage. To celebrate, they take a drive on the freeway.

I'm not in a hurry; it's a parking lot anyway; please do butt in line.